The Lizard Cage (48 page)

“What are they going to do, break my jaw again to stuff food down my throat?”

“Possibly. If the Chief’s feeling generous, he might strap you down in here and hook you up to an IV.”

Teza looks at him suspiciously. He doesn’t believe the prison authorities would handle any problem with such finesse. “No one will do that immediately.”

“So you
are
serious about the hunger strike.”

“You thought I was pulling your leg?” Genuine bemusement lightens Teza’s voice.

The jailer closes his eyes for a long moment. When he opens them, he asks, “What are your demands?”

Teza slowly crosses his legs, so that the ankle of his bottom foot presses against the dirty weave of his mat. He lifts the other foot and nestles it in the cradle of slack thigh and calf. Then he says, “I have no demands.”

“But if it’s a hunger strike, the prisoner always has demands.”

The senior jailer sounds like a petulant child, Teza thinks, scratching the rash of scabies along his shin. He shrugs. “If I must have a demand, then I demand to be released so that I can go eat curry and rice with my mother.”

“Ko Teza, please don’t make stupid jokes.”

“That’s my demand. Surely it’s no more stupid than my being here in the first place.”

“I cannot tell that to the Chief.”

“I could tell him. I’ll explain why now is the perfect time to release me.”

Chit Naing smiles nervously. “Even if you ask politely, I don’t think they’ll let you go.”

The two men look at each other. Teza’s voice is clear and resonant. “No, they won’t let me go. I know that, U Chit Naing. But I intend to release myself. I’m ready to leave the cage.”

Chit Naing gets out his handkerchief, takes off his glasses, and squints at his friend’s blurred, softened face. “You have to serve out your sentence …” He is aware how ridiculous these words sound, but he can’t help saying them, holding on to this reality, this version of how things must be. Teza will serve out his sentence, thirteen more years, less if there’s an amnesty. There might be amnesty next year, or the year after; sometimes it does happen. It’s happened before, when those human rights groups in the West have campaigns for certain political prisoners. It makes the generals fret about the bad publicity, and they let the person go. It’s happened before. Look at Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. They’ve released her from house arrest.

Teza stares at Chit Naing with a sympathetic, almost fatherly expression. “I know all about serving my sentence. That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean, then?”

Teza stares past his friend’s shoulder, up to the left, at the slice of blue sky. Then his eyes return to Chit Naing, who hasn’t been able to resist cleaning his glasses. The singer waits until the polishing is over and the jailer has put them back on. He’s about to speak when Chit Naing starts to fiddle with the wires behind his ears, making the lenses flash once, twice, again, like signal mirrors. His left eyebrow and cheek have tightened up, as though he has a bad toothache.

When his eyes are visible again, and steady, Teza answers his question. “I mean that I am ready to leave this body behind.”

Chit Naing stares at him for such a long, stunned moment that Teza starts to wonder if the jailer has understood. Will he have to be more explicit? But then the torrent of words begins. “Ko Teza, stop. It’s the beating. The beating took something out of you. Obviously it was awful physically”—he lifts his hand in the general direction of Teza’s face—“but psychologically, your mind, you haven’t been the same since. And you’ve been fasting already—you’ve lost so much weight, no wonder you
haven’t gotten better. You need to drop the Sixth Precept. Start eating your evening meal. I will get the boy more rice. I will, I promise you. I know he eats your food. The guys in the kitchen take some too—it’s a double portion. If you just started to eat more, you would feel better. And the morphine. You need to take it, Ko Teza. The pain is too much, you see—it’s affecting your mind.”

The jailer is gesticulating now, as if talking to himself. “It doesn’t make any sense. You have to think of …” The word comes out in a barely audible whisper, “The movement. All you’ve worked for. And Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. She’s free now. And your …” Teza knows what he’s going to say. “Your mother. Think of her. She’s already lost so much. If you just give yourself time to get better, you will change your mind. I am sure of it. You are depressed because of your injuries.” Like a flare in empty ocean, the jailer throws his final argument out into the cell: “To live through so much, and then to give up!”

Teza lightly responds, “U Chit Naing, don’t say that. I’m not giving up. I am ending the war.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I can’t hate them anymore. I don’t hate them.”

“Who?”

“The men who put me here, who keep me here. The generals, the MI agents. The Chief Warden. All of them. Even Handsome. I must not hate him for what he did to me.” His voice is warm but eerily toneless.

Chit Naing’s eyes have grown amazed, even incredulous, behind his glasses, but he sounds impatient. “Ko Teza, what do you mean?”

“I mean that I have ended the war. My own war. It’s done.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I do not want to die hating them, the terrible
them
. Who are they? They are my own people. You were once
them.
”

“Fine, Ko Teza, I will agree with you if that’s what you want, but can’t you end your war without a hunger strike? You have to fight against them, Ko Teza. Don’t you remember what you told me once? I remember exactly. You said, ‘In the cage, the only weapon I have is my own life.’ How can you give that up now?”

“What I said was true. But look at my body. Look at my face. I don’t need to defend myself now.”

“Why not?”

Chit Naing sounds offended. “You forget that people still listen to your songs. You are the singer. Don’t you remember why you’re here? Because of the struggle. How can you abandon it? Think of your brother on the border—he’s still working.”

“If he’s still alive, yes, I imagine he’s still working.”

“He’s mentioned regularly in the newspaper as an enemy of the people, so he must be alive. If he’d been killed, the government would have made a big celebratory announcement.”

Teza laughs quietly.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’m just thinking of how pissed off they’ll be when I … go.”

“Ko Teza, you are not going anywhere!”

Teza ignores him. “Their power takes such unexpected forms. Sometimes killing is the power. Sometimes keeping someone miserably alive is the power. Those two things look so different, but they are the same—they come from the same will to control, to violate. It’s true that my life has been my weapon. But death can be a weapon also.”

Chit Naing has started to feel nauseous. He stares at the singer, who calmly, almost blandly, returns his gaze.

“U Chit Naing, do you know about the hunger strikers of Coco Island?”

The jailer has never told Teza that his father was a chief warden of Thayawaddy Prison and, years before that, an overseer for the work camps on Coco. “Yes,” he mumbles, deflated, his sense of indignation gone. “Yes, of course I know.”

“The prisoners who staged those hunger strikes knew that choosing their own death was a better choice than enduring degradation day after day. They
chose
. They died in their friends’ arms. Did you know that? Their friends helped them to die with dignity.”

“Yes, Ko Teza, but they died and their friends got off the island alive.”

“We have to respect the choice they made. Their deaths forced the authorities to pay more attention to the camps. Their friends were released sooner because of the strikes.”

“But who will be released sooner if you die, Ko Teza?”

“Me. I will be released. You see? My decision is a selfish one, finally. I
am very tired. I am ready. The only one I worry about is the boy. I want him to leave before I begin the strike.”

“Listen, we’ll talk more about this strike business later. I have to go. But about the boy—I went to the monastery school last night.”

“It was still there, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And the Hsayadaw is still alive.”

“He is, but he’s away in Sagaing for a couple of days. The pongyi-kyaung is very full, but I think they’ll find a place for him. I’ve spoken to the Chief Warden. He’s willing to let the boy go. Last night I talked with the Hsayadaw’s assistant, a monk who grew up there. He knows you, he said, you played together as children. And he knows the songs.”

Teza puts a hand to his chest in a gesture of thanks. “This is the best gift, U Chit Naing.”

“But we can’t be sure if the boy will want to go.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll talk to him again. He’s close to making the decision for himself. He’s just getting ready. It takes time. Doesn’t it?”

The two men look at each other without speaking. Teza sits cross-legged in his cell and Chit Naing crouches in front of him, one hand gripping an iron bar for balance. He knows he must quell his rising emotion. It’s disconcerting to realize how much he draws his own strength from the presence of this wasted prisoner, Teza of the beloved songs, the man in solitary who endures with dignity, grace, and humor. Where to put the unfathomable idea of his absence? He staunchly refuses the word
death
. The hunger strike won’t work. They’ll force him to eat. Chit Naing is ashamed to hear the thought forming in his mind,
I will force him
.

Teza no-longer-here shakes the very center of his mind. He grips the iron bar, the muscles in his hand and wrist and lower arm contracted and aching, until Teza whispers, “U Chit Naing, are you all right?”

The jailer blinks at him. He releases the bar and pulls his hand across his mouth. Before rising, he whispers, “If I can, I’ll come again tomorrow.” The visit will be for himself, he knows, as much as for Teza.

S
ein Yun stares at the Buddha’s face. He’s trying for a holier-than-thou expression and thinking about water buffalo. About that proverb actually, so dear to his heart: When the buffalo fight, the tender grass gets trampled. Oh, well, that’s tough for the grass, isn’t it? Everyone has their karma in this shitty life.

Straightening the hair that kinks from his chin, he tries to throw a religious glance back across the compound. He’s waiting for Soe Thein to come by with a little package of quinine for a prisoner in Hall Three. The guy’s sick with an attack of malaria. Soe Thein is okay, he’s useful enough—he got Sein Yun some pills for his hepatitis—though he still refuses to bring in the hard stuff; he’s a warder with principles. Chuckling under his breath, Sein Yun shuffles away from the praying ground of the shrine and spits his betel juice, then returns to wait for the warder. Bloody principles! Their inevitable erosion is always pleasant to observe. Quinine and new syringes today, amphetamines and smack tomorrow. Or next week, or next year.

There will be a next year, and a year after that. Maybe more. Handsome is a fucking idiot. Why didn’t the palm-reader see that from the beginning? He’s done so much work in the past two and a half months. That
whole laborious setup with the politicals, all the pen-and-paper-ferrying and rah-rah-rah-ing for the revolution, the bloody mess with the Songbird. Not to mention weeks of looking for that stupid pen. And what has all his magnificent bullshitting accomplished?

Handsome sent him a note last night. He was in a fit, an absolute
fit
, after another fuckup with that kid. Just what did the note say? Was it a thank-you note, commending Sein Yun for his psychic detective work? Was it perhaps a little poem, praising his great dedication to the retarded junior jailer?

No, it was two scrawled lines of poison cursing Sein Yun’s name and mother. Not only has the palm-reader lost his sentence reduction, but for the next two years he’ll have to put up with that asshole who couldn’t even manage to shake down a twelve-year-old. He didn’t find the pen. Sein Yun pulls and pulls on his unruly hair.

He
knows
the kid has the pen. He can feel it. He would bet every palm he’s ever read on it: Cut their hands off! The boy has that precious piece of contraband. Or he
had
the damn thing and somehow got rid of it in the nick of time. Unbelievable. Not once but twice—
twice!
—the palm-reader serves up exactly what Handsome orders and the idiot wastes it.

The more he thinks about it, the more pissed off he gets. The prison kings got what
they
wanted. Better said, they’ll give away what they want to give away when all the contraband cases go to trial next month. Right now the politicals are still in the dog cells, edging away from the tide of their own shit and enjoying the last of the monsoon on their bare heads. But at the end of October’s hearing, the Chief Warden will hand out about eighty years’ worth of extended sentences to the letter-writers from Hall Three.

So something went wrong with Teza. Is that the palm-reader’s fault?

Handsome was the one who screwed up, all because of a brat with a rat stick and a smart-aleck stare. How could they have been outsmarted by an illiterate, garbage-eating
child
? It’s disgusting. All those free palm readings, what does he get for them? Dick all.

Buggered.

The word makes him think of their own resident water buffalo. Forget the nickname Eggplant, the cook has more in common with an ox. His fleshy lower lip droops, as though the tendon that holds it up has been cut
away. His big bottom teeth are almost always visible, the horizontal grain of them stained brown, just like a water buffalo’s.

The palm-reader’s scowl slowly turns into a smirk, which spreads into a smile. He thinks again about the little creature—kaung-lay, kala-lay, nyi lay, they call him by so many names—and remembers the school longyi the boy was wearing this morning, wrapped tight around his skinny hips, bright and deep green both, and he renames the child so easily, so
aptly
, it makes him laugh: little jungle snatch, little tender-assed patch of grass.